BookLovers: The many shades of love

Well, BookLovers, the Feast of Saint Valentine is soon upon us. And so today, we talk about books on love.

Lauren Daley

Well, BookLovers, the Feast of Saint Valentine is soon upon us. And so today, we talk about books on love.

First, some context:

Contrary to popular skeptic belief, Valentine's Day was not invented by Hallmark and Russell Stover.

In fact, it survived some 1,400 for years before greeting cards and boxed candies were invented.

It's an ancient holy day, sanctioned by Pope Gelasius around 498 A.D., and popularized and celebrated in the days of Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1300s.

We don't know who the day is actually for — the Catholic Church acknowledges three saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyrs.

According to one legend, History.com tells us, Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than married ones, he outlawed marriage. Valentine defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Some say that when Valentine was imprisoned, he fell in love with his jailor's daughter. Before he was put to death, he wrote her a love letter, signed "From your Valentine."

Now, there is a very basic reason that, 1,500 years after all this supposedly took place, Stop & Shop and CVS glow red with Valentines each February.

That is reason is love, the most basic and essential of all human feelings.

And I'm not just talking about romantic love. Familial love is equal to, often times greater than, romantic love. It's the first type of love we learn as humans.

That's what makes Christopher Castellani's new novel, "All This Talk of Love" (2013) so touching.

Castellani — a Massachusetts Book Award-winning novelist and the executive director at Grub Street Writers Center in Boston — will be the featured guest writer at this month's Writer's Series at Partners Village Store from 3 to 5 p.m. Feb. 17. The event is free to the public.

Hosted and co-founded by award-winning author Dawn Tripp of Westport, The Writer's Series aims to be an open discussion with the author about the writing process, the work of creating a story, and publishing.

"All This Talk of Love" is the story of an Italian immigrant family, the Grassos. It's been 50 years since Antonio married Maddalena and brought her to America. That was the last time she would ever see her parents, her sisters and brothers — everything she knew and loved in the village of Santa Cecilia.

Maddalena locked those memories away, as if Santa Cecilia stopped existing the very day she left. Now, with children and grandchildren of her own, a successful family-run restaurant, and enough daily drama at home, Maddalena sees no need to open the door to the past and let the emotional baggage spill out.

But daughter Prima was raised on the lore of the Old Country. As she sees her parents aging, she hatches the idea to take the entire family back to Italy — hoping to reunite Maddalena with her estranged sister and let her parents see their homeland one last time. It is an idea that threatens to tear the Grasso family apart, as fate deals them some unwelcome surprises "¦

I had a chance to talk to Castellani, the son of Italian immigrants, this week.

"Most kids grow up on fairy tales and cartoons — I grew up listening to my parents tell stories about their childhood in a small war-torn Italian village at the top of a mountain," Castellani, of Boston, told me.

"But unlike most kids whose parents rattle on about their childhoods, I couldn't get enough of their stories," he told me. "I was continually fascinated by my parents, who seemed like aliens, different in every way from my friends' parents — they had strong accents, they didn't or couldn't read, they had blue-collar jobs, they had different traditions and rules."

Growing up in Delaware, Castellani was a shy boy who spent most of his time reading.

"My parents were my best and, for many years, my only friends," he said.

He wants readers to "see these Italian-American characters as complex human beings, not stereotypes. I want them to maybe examine their relationships with their own families a little more closely "¦ I want people to remember that you never know when you'll get a chance to say, 'Goodbye, I love you' to the people who are closest to you."